“I woke up and couldn’t feel my two legs,” South Korean artist Kijong Zin says quietly, weighing each English word before he speaks. “My back was broken.”
If it weren’t for that contingency, Zin would have continued his tour of duty in an elite special forces unit and might still be serving in the South Korean navy.
Instead, he returned to art school and is now showing in Two-Person Exhibition by Kuo I-chen and Kijong Zin (郭奕臣陳起鐘雙人展) at Taipei’s Galerie Grand Siecle (新苑藝術). The shy 28-year-old shares his Taiwan debut with Kuo, the Ciaotou (橋頭), Kaohsiung County-born artist who in 2005 became the youngest Taiwanese ever to represent his country at the Venice Biennale, when he was 26. The joint exhibition presents Kuo’s first works since finishing his military service last November.
Zin’s injury came just a year after he dropped out of a painting program at Kyungwon University to volunteer for the navy — rare in a country that, like Taiwan, requires males to serve in the military. When Zin returned to school, he switched to sculpture and eventually began experimenting with “new media art” using video and low-tech machines.
His works in the current show explore the relationship between truth and television. In CNN (2007), what at a casual glance appears to be a recorded news broadcast turns out to be a live video feed from a small mechanical set around the corner. The airplane seen in the “broadcast” is really a plastic model and the crawl — that text often seen moving along the bottom of news programs — is just a piece of printed tape looped between two spools.
Zin’s videos aren’t meant to fool anyone for long. On closer examination the viewer notices CNN’s faux images of the World Trade Center attacks are accompanied by text from what appears to be a poorly written tourism brochure from Scotland: “The gorges and lochs, greenmeadows overlooked the Cullin Hills. Clouds dropping down over the mountain tops greeting the viewers …”
BROTHERS IN ART
The gallery’s pairing of Zin and Kuo is no coincidence. The two met in 2005 when Zin first visited Taiwan to help his art teacher with an installation in Taipei. Zin’s teacher is friends with one of Taiwan’s best-known new media artists, Yuan Goang-ming (袁廣鳴), who was Kuo’s teacher at the time.
Later Kuo and Zin ran into each other at new media exhibitions in South Korea and Germany and discovered how much they have in common. They share an interest in geeky machinery, video and computers and were raised in small towns, though both now live in their countries’ capitals.
“We are brothers … country boys,” Kuo said as the two sipped Coca-Colas during a break from installing their show at Galerie Grand Siecle, which represents Kuo.
Like Zin’s CNN, Kuo’s latest pieces address the mass media’s presentation of the Sept. 11 attacks. Sculptures and paintings with inlaid video screens combine comic-book superheroes with images of the attacks or Muslim elements that have been mistakenly associated with terrorism and the Taliban, such as traditional clothing and Arabic script. Superheroes: Mask (2008-2009) fuses Batman’s hood and a burka headscarf in glimmering stainless steel that weighs more than 60kg.
Kuo stresses the concept in his work, downplaying the actual making of the art object. His paintings were mostly done by an assistant and his sculptures were cast at a foundry in Taipei based on toys and computer images he designed while serving in the military.
Judging from our interview, Zin would prefer to let his works speak for themselves. He wasn’t enthusiastic to talk about them or anything else, despite the fact he speaks passable English. To be nice, we’ll attribute this to shyness. In the past, he’s compared his interest in television to a child’s fascination with whether people on black-and-white programs were actually black-and-white in person.
Pressed to describe the accident that ended his naval career, Zin said he was helicoptered to a hospital where he had emergency surgery and stayed for two months before being released in a tortoise-shell brace. More than five years later, he’s fully recovered.
The obvious question seemed to surprise him: How’d it happen?
By this time I was somewhat prepared for his answer: “Training was very hard … I don’t know,”
he said.
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